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Patrick O'Brian (December 12 1914–January 2 2000) was a novelist and translator, best known for his Aubrey–Maturin series of novels set in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars and centering on the friendship of Captain Jack Aubrey and Irish–Catalan physician, naturalist and spy Stephen Maturin. The 20 novels in the series are notable for their detailed portrayals of life in the early 19th century.
In the 1950s O?Brian wrote two books aimed at a younger age-group, The Golden Ocean and The Unknown Shore which were based on events of the Anson circumnavigation of 1740 – 1743. Although written many years before the Aubrey–Maturin series series, the literary antecedents of Aubrey and Maturin are clearly seen in the characters of Jack Byron and Tobias Barrow.
As well as his historical novels, O'Brian wrote several mainstream novels and a body of short stories, and was a respected translator, responsible for the translation of Henri Charriere's Papillon into English, as well as many of Simone de Beauvoir's later works.
O'Brian also wrote a detailed biography of Sir Joseph Banks, one of the leading scientific figures of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and the man largely responsible for the colonization of Australia.
O'Brian's biography of Pablo Picasso, Pablo Ruiz Picasso: A Biography, is a massive and comprehensive study of the artist who for a time lived in the same French Catalan village as O'Brian and with whom he was acquainted.
O'Brian had published several novels and stories under the name Richard Patrick Russ, notably, Caesar and Hussein: an Entertainment, both published before he was 21. Richard Patrick Russ legally changed his name to Patrick O'Brian in 1945.
Despite a widely held belief to the contrary and which he himself fostered, O'Brian was not born in Ireland, but in Chalfont St. Peter,Buckinghamshire. A biography, Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed, by Dean King, documents his complex personality and life.
Peter Weir's 2003 film, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is based on the Aubrey–Maturin series, and draws its material from several of the novels' plots.
Historian Nikolai Tolstoy is O'Brian's stepson through marriage to Tolstoy's mother, Mary. Mary Tolstoy divorced and married O'Brian. Nikolai Tolstoy is preparing a new biography of O'Brian using sources from the Russ and Tolstoy family.
See the Aubrey–Maturin series article.
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